But a thread on Twitter caught my attention yesterday, and I couldn’t let it pass without some commentary. And that, in turn, opened up a whole new level of offensive wrongthink. Underneath it is, in this blogger’s opinion, one of the most important issues of our time.

A progressive woman laments how Elon Musk is, in her view, wasting his money launching automobiles into space. Instead, she tells us, he should spend his billions on Flint, a Democrat-run shithole (thanks, Mr. President, I’m using that term a lot more from now on) that can’t even deliver clean water to its residents.

As tired as my newborn has made me in recent days, this is worse. Progressive arguments like this are legion. Instead of using your money for anything else, you should dedicate it all to notions of wealth distribution. Forget your personal desires, your dreams, your aspirations for the very future of mankind itself… instead give everything to politicians.

Dear readers, enough is enough. I’m usually at least somewhat polite on this blog, so take it to heart when I say this. Grasp my full meaning: fuck them all. Toss them out of helicopters, or into woodchippers, or just air drop them into Somalia. I don’t even care anymore. But this is the last straw, folks.

Their short-sighted, Dunning-Kruger infused, elementary school worldview is beyond evil and into a realm of nonsensical mental masturbation. It’s a Lovecraftian horror, except it is inverted. Instead of greater beings beyond our comprehension filling us with horror because of our relative smallness, we have lesser beings whose sheer stupidity and ignorance of all sense is such that to even try to empathize with them causes headaches of massive proportions. To even comprehend such idiocy is horror-inducing.

Not that any of this is new. Back during the days of the Apollo Program, there were plenty of people lamenting that the money that sent a man to the moon would be better spent putting an end to poverty. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.

Another cretinous fool on Twitter explained that Carl Sagan told us not to perform such crazy marketing stunts in space. This esteemed idiot supplied the following quotation:

So, what? Only Communists should go to space? Earth is for everybody, but space is for Communists! No Capitalists allowed. I know a lot of folks revere Carl Sagan, but this certainly ranks high on dumb quotes by this guy.

I started noticing a pattern. Most of the detractors of Elon Musk’s little stunt were women. Most of those singing his praises were men. That reinforces an old, but correct notion that women trend more Progressive than men. Look, I know a lot of smart women (Sarah Hoyt comes to mind right away), but at the same time there is something very, very wrong here.

Why are so many women fixated on first-order problems, without any conception of second-order effects? I mean, imagine if the folks at early Intel who pioneered CPU design, had instead donated all of their money to some politically-correct victim class and bowed out? What would benefit poor people more, a few thousand dollars worth of bread, or technological progress that eventually put the entire sum of human knowledge at their fingertips within seconds?

Our intrepid Progressive women cannot imagine the future benefits to everyone, the poor included, of opening up space to mankind. The entire future of our species, the whole universe there waiting for us, and this chick is fixated on Flint’s water supply? It’s maddening! It gives me a headache. It’s exhausting even trying to understand how a human brain could possibly operate that way.

But I see a lot of modern women who have this kind of thought process. Take a look at this feminist whopper:

Her complete inability to understand anything past her own immediate worldview is simply staggering to contemplate. This is extreme solipsism. Does she not understand what men say to each other on a regular basis? My daily conversations with my male friends would send your average feminist woman into conniption fits. They might give her seizures. She claims to want to be treated just like a man, but no woman actually wants this.

So hey, Thales, how is this related to Elon Musk launching a car into space? I’m getting to that.

I started thinking this morning that perhaps we aren’t dealing with an inability to see beyond first-order effects so much as an inability to virtue-signal them rhetorically. It’s rhetorically easy to point to a crazy publicity stunt and call it stupid. It’s rhetorically difficult to demonstrate the larger utility of the affair, the technological milestones SpaceX achieved in the process. It’s rhetorically easy to give a man a fish and say “look at me, I’m a good person for giving this man a fish!” It’s rhetorically difficult to demonstrate how your long-term plan to teach the man to fish will benefit mankind.

Virtue-signalling is subject to the rule of laziness. If there are two ways you can virtue-signal your moral superiority, Progressives will invariably pick the easiest one. Here’s your fish, come back tomorrow for another. Of what possible use is a microchip to a poor person? No cars in space. And why land a man on the moon? What a waste, am I right?

In other words, it’s easy to drop a first-order effect into a rhetorical conversation and ignore all other effects of that decision, as if everything was in isolation. Nothing in the universe works that way.

And for some reason, women appear more vulnerable to this tactic than men. The irony of the no billboards in space comment? It’s usually women who are more consumerist than men. Marketing? Commercials? All targeted toward women. That’s why almost every man is a dofus in TV commercials, and every woman is a wise, sage-like being of feminine supremacy. Who spends all the money? The answer to that is obvious enough. And yet, women trend anti-Capitalist? It makes no sense, until you start looking at everything from a first-order effect perspective. She wants X, and so she buys X without any thought to the greater ramifications… unless, of course, political correctness rears its ugly head, hijacks her mind, and pushes its claptrap. Then it’s save the whales, don’t buy fur, and no automobiles in space. Those, too, are considered without thought for greater ramifications.

Don’t ask me if this is innate to female biology, or just a product of a century or so of Radical Feminist thinking and conditioning, or some combination thereof. I don’t know, and my headache is too great to speculate at the moment. But whatever the cause, I’m tired of it. When I was a kid, I can remember a little optimism left in the world. Not much, for Progressivism was already on the march even then, and had been for a long time. But still, it was worth looking up and thinking “someday, I’m going to achieve something great.”

Not anymore, I guess. You can launch your car into space, and some idiotic denizen of Twitter will stand up and say “laaaaaame, you should have given your money to some Democrats instead. What are you, some kind of racist?”